


Touchup

by theyhulk



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Branding, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Mother hen Aziraphale, No footnotes, Post-Fall (Good Omens), Pre-armagedidn't, Tattoos, We Die Like Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 14:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20211349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyhulk/pseuds/theyhulk
Summary: It’s less of a tattoo and more of a brand.





	Touchup

**Author's Note:**

> This is the beginning of my bellyflop into the Good Omens fandom. I've binged it three times in a month, my goodness it's just magnificent. I hope this is up to par and in character. It was a lot of fun to write, and I already have a similar piece in the works. Stay tuned!
> 
> P.S. I did research about the history of tattoos in terms of timeline and method, but don’t take what I wrote to the bank, because history is hard. Also, take better care of your tattoo than Crowley does.

Things were different after the Fall. There were lines in the dirt now. Hard, firm lines that weren’t there before. Sure, some angels played the ‘love thy neighbor’ thing fast and loose, but they’d all been on the same side.

In hindsight, he should have known that God and her cronies were waiting for the split to happen. Lucifer and his lot were just scapegoats for the thirst for power only Archangels had. Have. Dominion over humans wasn’t enough--there was no fun in smiting someone who had comparably no weapons, literally, and no limbs, eyes, or ears, metaphorically. One way or another, the angels were going to go to war.

But not yet.

For now, Heaven was waiting for an even playing field. Demonstrating their mercy by letting the newly appointed demons get used to their new cozy home, where mold was already growing on the walls. It was the opposite of the bright sterility of Heaven: Hell was dark, damp, and crowded to the degree that it began to stink of corporeal forms immediately.

Their Graces were gone (literally). Torn away, like their wings (also literally, but not in all cases). Crowley was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t a direct target, even after the affair with the apple. That angel Aziraphale probably took the fall for that, actually. He already looked suspicious, what with his whole here’s-a-flaming-sword schtick.

He was one of the lucky ones, because he was a fucking coward, and a slippery bastard to boot. The key word there being ‘slippery.’ And possibly ‘coward.’ He was quick to volunteer for Earthly duties when vicariously fucking over Heaven became Hell’s goal, and maintaining a scrap of personhood became Crowley’s.

But he wasn’t let off the hook.

One of Her conditions of the Fall: demons had to be marked. Whether to protect humans or to paint a target on their backs, they had to be noticeably foul. The generic demon got sores and/or holes for eyes; the higher-ups got patrons humanity hated. To add insult to injury, they had to be hosts for said patrons, because even ‘parasite’ suggested a threat. Suggested the ability to _do_ something. But carrying creepy crawlies on their heads saddled them with their sin. There was a tarnished silver lining, at least. Hastur looked ridiculous with his toad-hat.

To revisit the ‘slippery coward’ thing, Crowley had managed to avoid that particular fate. He’d established himself the top pick for a tempter on earth, given that Beelzebub was too busy and Hastur and Ligur lacked even a shred of finesse. Ultimately, Beelzebub made the call: to fit in with the general populous, Crowley couldn’t exactly walk about with a snake coiled on top of his head. It wasn’t a popular decision; Crowley wasn’t a popular demon. He wasn’t Lucifer, who was regarded with the same awe as Caesar or Joe DiMaggio, but he _was_ the Serpent of Eden. There wasn’t a shortage of former-angels who blamed him for getting the ball rolling. Said ball having been made of Her righteous fury and the Archangels’ smug smiles.

So they left his eyes. Once golden, they were now yellow like a bad infection, like an old bruise.

* * *

The first time he witnessed tattooing was in Greece, quite some time before the birth and death of Christ. The first thief wailed as they cut his crime into his forehead. The second did not. Crowley quickly gathered that tattoos were used to penalize; to permanently mark deviance. Later, they became an act of rebellion or an expression of religious worship.

Penalty. Rebellion. Worship. It was so morbidly ironic that Crowley nearly laughed when the needle touched the skin for the first time. Later, inspecting the soot healing into the skin of his temple (a snake across the forehead was a bit too flashy for his taste), he decided it suited him.

Over the centuries, he had to have it redone. He watched the evolution of methods with vague interest, but it became more or less a chore. A habit. Even something he looked forward to, eventually. And every time he touched it up, once or twice a decade, the design got better: what had once been a distinguishably serpentine squiggle was now complete with tiny little scales and a reddish underbelly. It looked good. It looked cool.

But that didn’t change what it meant. At first, he’d grown his hair out to hide it. It was only recently--in the last decade, actually--that he’d cut it short. Before that, when he was feeling a bit rebellious, he’d tuck a bit behind his right ear to bare the tattoo. On the wall caging the Garden, during Shakespeare’s dismal times (those trousers were _atrocious_, but at least he’d looked less ridiculous than Aziraphale), during the ‘60s. Not during the Flood, not during the French Revolution (it and the exaggerated curls made him feel more like a spectacle (ha) than the epitome of fashion, and he leaned into that), and not now. It wasn’t like his eyes. It was something he could get used to. And something passerbys wouldn’t faint upon seeing. That kind of reaction was always a bit of fun, but when the thrill wore off, it left him feeling more empty than satisfied.

* * *

It had been just a few days since he’d gotten his last touchup. Coincidentally, it had also been a few days since the world hadn’t ended. He hadn’t bothered eleven years ago, given the whole ‘the kid I’m singing lullabies to isn’t the Antichrist, but someone is’ thing. It hadn’t been a priority.

It had been just a few days since he’d gotten his last touchup, the latest of _many_ touchups, and he still hadn’t shaken the habit of picking at the flaking. The red ink, for whatever reason, always healed more slowly than the black. It took a tremendous amount of self-restraint not to pull the scabs right off. He’d done it once before, and the infection, courtesy of the cramped conditions of Hell, was better than the way it had fucked up the design.

Aziraphale had scolded him for it then, and he scolded Crowley for it now.

“Don’t pick, my dear,” He said, bustling about his shop like he had customers to organize for. Crowley knew he was really just clearing space because he needed to make room for an incoming collection of dusty additions from someone or another--Aziraphale liked his books a bit worse for the wear. It meant he got to spoil them. He’d long ago mastered the balance between leaving them to gather dust and restoring them completely. He liked his books ‘well loved’, whatever that meant. Aziraphale was convinced inanimate objects could be vessels of love, that loving them made the space they inhabited feel loved. And yet he was still took umbrage at the rare customer. “You’re going to make it scar.”

“We don’t get scars.” Crowley groused, dropping his hand. Aziraphale shot him a look, lips pursed somewhere between a smile and a frown, but didn’t push the lie. Angels and demons were as supernatural as they came, but their squishy corporeal forms were just as receptive to a crowbar to the back as any rando. Hastur had proved that, the wanker.

Moments of comfortable silence passed and Crowley’s hand snuck back up to convince a flake of dry skin to fall away under the assault of his thumbnail. Then Aziraphale paused before the bookshelf that, to Crowley’s eye, looked just as messy as it had when he’d started, and the atmosphere shifted. Crowley could sense the approach of a serious conversation like a train bearing down on him, and braced himself. They hadn’t had many of those since the world didn’t end, both of them (ostensibly, at least) pretending they were doing just fine after the fabric of their respective universes was jerked out from under their feet. Crowley had hoped, like the magician’s trick, things would happen so quickly everything settled immediately after. No aftershocks, no rattling dishware.

He hated cheap sleight-of-hand (_was_ that sleight-of-hand?) magic. It made people believe in the impossible.

“Why did you get it redone?”

It wasn’t a question Crowley had been expecting. “Get what redone?”

Aziraphale gestured vaguely at his face. “The tattoo. You said we don’t have sides anymore. So. Why bother? Why not--make it go away?” His voice was careful, halting, like he could sense unstable footing even though they’d never talked about Crowley’s little ink companion.

_You said we don’t have sides anymore._ He had, hadn’t he. He could lie and say he’d been trying to tempt Aziraphale to stay the night for some nefarious reason or another, but Aziraphale would probably just make a joke that Crowley wasn’t capable of tempting anymore. If Hell and Heaven stopped being...things, Crowley wouldn’t technically be a demon, and Aziraphale not technically an angel. He didn’t know which scared him more.

He couldn’t _not_ be a demon. Denouncing that would be like pretending the last six thousand years (plus change) hadn’t happened. Like admitting everything he’d done in that time--including the Fall--meant nothing. He couldn’t lose who he was. Not again.

Failing to ignore what felt like a great hollowness, in the aftermath of the buildup and climax of Armagedidn’t, Crowley traced a finger over the tattoo. Even if the lines weren’t raised, he’d memorized the shape of the coils centuries ago.

“I have an image to maintain, angel.”


End file.
